[1] A model is presented here to explain the generation of surface material on Mars using chemical, magnetic, and spectroscopic data from Mars and geologic analogs from terrestrial sites. One basic premise is that the dust/soil units are not derived exclusively from local rocks, but are rather a product of global, and possibly remote, weathering processes. Another assumption in this model is th...

Soil depth and texture exert strong controls on the spatial distribution of water and energy fluxes and states in semiarid watersheds. As a result, realistic representations of the spatial soil characteristics within watersheds are important for the improvement of process-based distributed hydrologic modeling applications. In this study, we evaluated the effects of combinations of soil thicknes...

soil quality is the most suitable index to an assessment of the stability of terrestrial ecosystems, especially agro-ecosystems. to determine the effects of agricultural practices on soil organic matter, species richness and abundance of soil invertebrates, a study was conducted in three regions of razavi and northern khorasan provinces, iran. soil were taken from in each winter wheat field of ...

Because of the large contrast between the dielectric constant of liquid water and that of dry soil at microwave wavelength, there is a strong dependence of the thermal emission and radar backscatter from the soil on its moisture content. This dependence provides a means for the remote sensing of the moisture content in a surface layer approximately 5 cm thick. The feasibility of these technique...

Soil moisture is a key parameter in different environmental applications, suchas hydrology and natural risk assessment. In this paper, surface soil moisture mappingwas carried out over a basin in France using satellite synthetic aperture radar (SAR)images acquired in 2006 and 2007 by C-band (5.3 GHz) sensors. The comparisonbetween soil moisture estimated from SAR data and in situ measurements s...

Surface soil moisture is important to understand environmental systems and dielectric constant is a convenient physical parameter to describe this. Dielectric Mixing models relate the effective dielectric constant of a heterogeneous medium with the properties of constituent materials. The dielectric properties of the soil is known to have dependence on Soil moisture content along with other fac...

Soil surface texture is an important environmental factor that influences crop productivity because of its direct effect on soil water and complex interactions with other environmental factors. Using 30-year data, an agricultural system model (DSSAT-CERES-Wheat) was calibrated and validated. After validation, the modelled yield and water use (WU) of spring wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) from two ...

This paper addresses and documents a number of issues related to the implementation of an advanced land surface–hydrology model in the Penn State–NCAR fifth-generation Mesoscale Model (MM5). The concept adopted here is that the land surface model should be able to provide not only reasonable diurnal variations of surface heat fluxes as surface boundary conditions for coupled models, but also co...

Woody plant encroachment in savannas may alter carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) pools over the longterm, which could have regional or global biogeochemical implications given the widespread encroachment observed in the vast savanna biome. Soil and litter %C and %N were surveyed across four soil types in two encroached, semiarid savanna landscapes in northern South Africa. Litter at sampling points w...